Associative Learning in Zebrafish (Danio rerio)

The zebrafish has been one of the primary study species utilized in developmental biology. However, it is also gaining increasing amount of interest in other disciplines of biology including behavioral neuroscience; the numerous genetic tools developed and the large amount of genetic information accumulated for this species by now make it an excellent tool for the analysis of the mechanisms of complex central nervous system characteristics. Although several studies have investigated the biological and genetic underpinnings of associative learning (and memory), given the complexity of these phenomena, much remains to be discovered. In the past, the zebrafish has been employed particularly successfully in screening applications where a large number of mutations or drug effects had to be analyzed. Briefly, the practical simplicity and system complexity of the zebrafish may make this species an excellent tool also for the analysis of the mechanisms of associative learning. Screening, however, requires appropriate phenotypical (in this case behavioral) paradigms. A step in this direction is the characterization of learning abilities of zebra fish. The number of studies focused on cognitive and/or mnemonic characteristics of zebrafish is orders of magnitude smaller than those with rats or mice, but recently zebrafish has also started to be utilized in this research. The current chapter reviews these most recent developments. It also discusses certain unique features of zebrafish that must be taken into account when designing an associative learning task and how these tasks may be made high throughput.